OpenStreetMap and Me
All the attention OpenStreetMap has been receiving of late with respect to the Haitian earthquake prodded me to stop procrastinating, sign up for an account there, and poke around with it a bit. In what I think was a wise move, I stayed well away from the Haitian map tiles and fiddled around with the online editor in areas I knew well but were not mapped very thoroughly. (My home town is scarcely mapped at all. I will have to do something about that.)
So, if any OSM members have been wondering who the hell has been screwing up the maps in the Ottawa-Gatineau area (especially Hull and Aylmer), the Upper Ottawa Valley (especially the Quebec side) and a couple of spots in Winnipeg — um, that was me. Sorry. It was too much fun.
In addition to my acts of map data desecration, I’ve been doing some reading on how to create, edit and classify the data. I don’t have anything profound to say yet, but I might later on.
Update, 12:40 PM: I should clarify that when I say “my town is scarcely mapped at all,” I mean that it’s scarcely mapped in OpenStreetMap — it’s well covered by both Navteq and Tele Atlas and shows up in Google, Bing, MapQuest and Yahoo.
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The Map Room is a blog about maps by
Welcome to the community! It is amazing that OpenStreetMap has reached an age of maturity and recognition that permits it to be a primary source of data for government and responders.
There are a lot of projects in governments and communities around the world incorporating OSM more directly into their open data policies as well as helping in their infrastructure development and maintenance.
January 27, 2010 at 11:28 AM